..it goes something like this...you make some initial, maybe disinterested, observations...these lead you to form a hypothesis, a working idea or explanation for what you THINK you see...then you design experiments to test your hypothesis...and you accept the results dispassionately.

You don't JUST observe and then make up a conclusion...like, "I see I have hairy knuckles, THEREFORE: I deserve Iraq". That isn't scientific...it's patriotic of you and will get you Assrian friends...but you'll be laughed at elsewhere and for a long time. You'll be welcome at aina though.

I observed an awful lot of hand-wringing over the "suffering" of "Assyrians". Heard and saw a lot of sorrowful people...people crying, praying...people demanding that these sorts of things be stopped, that Assyrians didn't deserve to be killed or made to suffer...I endured the sight of annual calls to "remember" and to "never forget"...I saw posts at aina expressing outrage that ANY "Assyrian" should be killed...I also saw people running to the Sudan, or trying to send me, to point out ANY Christian suffering death or worse....as I say I OBSERVED all of this for four years and more...until I formed a hypothesis: Assyrian Christians are deeply saddened whenever another Christian Assyrian is killed. That was the tentative conclusion I drew from all my observations and I placed it in the form of a statement that could be tested...after all...one needs some objective evidence as well.

It just so happened that the war against Iraq gave me plenty of opportunity to watch how Christian Assyrians reacted to the death, to the frequent deaths, of their fellow Christian Assyrians...so I watched...listened and took note.

And then an odd thing occured...something I would not have expected to see at all...had I not looked more closely and gone beyond appearences. For instance I came across cases where Assyrian Christians had been killed and yet their names were NOT mentioned and no tears were shed for them...and further...that when it was pointed OUT to Assyrian Christians that other Assyrian Christians had been killed...in greussome ways and in alarming numbers...I was told that the facts and figures were not to be trusted...even when photos were presented and stories reported in other news sources...as for example our own Majdolin Younan and her murdered babies...there was still a surprising lack of interest and certainly no remorse..not even any mention.

Why was that...I wondered? Are all things constant in these cases? is there some variable whose presense or absence might shed light on this "selective sorrow" that seemed to wail for some Christians but not others? So I looked round to see what that could be...could it be that the Assyrian Christians no one cried over had been guilty of crimes? Had they done something to dishonor the name of "Assyria"? Were they traitors to "Assyria"? But since many of those ignored by their own were children...even babies in the womb yet, I decided that couldn't be it...and as no ever acused them of any crimes or gave any reason at all why they should be passed over, I concluded the variable was not in the victims themselves...and yet SOMETHING made them unworthy, as victims, of honorable mention or lamentations by their fellow Christian Assyrians...so what could it be?

Next I took a glance at the perpetrators of these crimes...if there was no telling difference among the victims, was there something different in the killers? And that's where I received a bit of a shock. It turned out that in every case...if the killer was Muslim, the victim was "dear" and a "tragic loss" and a "CRIME"! But, if the killer was a Christian...the victim was never heard of...no one wept...no one recognized any tragedy, or loss and NO crime.

As a scientist...what would one deduce? It would seem to me that the overiding concern for weeping and wailing Christians is NOT primarily the identity of the victim..it is the identity of the killer...and specifically, the religion of the killer....that of the victim remains constant.

My theory, based on the amount of wailing I heard and sincere SOUNDING protestations, was incorrect...Assyrian Christians do NOT care for the victims they weep over...or rather they do not care for the number of Christians killed EQUALLY...what they care about and what controls their tear ducts and moves them to commemoration services and long-winded speeches is the MUSLIM religion of the killers...that whenever the killer of a Christian is a Christian, they could care less...but when the killer of a Christian is a Muslim, their "hearts" open up and they demand someone's home as compensation.

It wasn't diffcult to test my new theory...and the last few posts at aina were all I needed to convince me I had discovered and proved a startling observation...a very different one than I began with...because I had mistakenly believed in the sincerity of Christian tears...silly me. I THOUGHT when I started that all dead Christians were being wept over...seemed sort of a natural thing to assume under the circumstances...but that turned out to be the wrong starting point...the real issue was that some Christians are NOT being wept for...and you wouldn't think that was possible...given the "sincerity" of Christian tears.

No one...no one I've addressed this question to over the last few years HAS been able to answer it. They just tell me to take a drink or have sex with a Muslim man while they watch...which is an entire other area worth exploring...but that's for another day.

I conclude from all of this that these sorts of Christians are more motivated by hatred of Muslims...than they are by "love" of Christians...that is my conclusion and it explains better what they have wished on Iraq than any other explanation I can think of...at the end of the day all this war has done is punish everybody, But Muslims MOST...and that's what these Christians wanted all along...there can be no other conclusion to be drawn...or else they would have cried for ALL murdered and innocent Christians...which they have YET to do. And...if ALL Christians were equally dear to them AND their fate paramount in their eyes and hearts...they would have ben far LESS eager to urge on a war that could only cost those people more in the end...and, finally...the only real "good" to come from this war...one no Christian will admit out loud...is that Iraq was PUNISHED!!!